


black irises

by SafelyCapricious



Series: things you find in a graveyard [18]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Deadly Shadows, Experimental Style, F/M, Fugue, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 23:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21089528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: They find her curled up in the cupboard that she’d covered in mirrors a week ago – they’d thought it was cute that her imaginary friend told her it would keep her safe – covered in blood.There’s broken furniture all over the house and what look like claw marks in the kitchen. But there’s no blood anywhere else.Her parents are frantic – frantic enough that they don’t think to look for her older brother who was supposed to be watching her until they realize that none of the blood is hers.They never find her brother.She insists that theshadowstook him.





	black irises

**Author's Note:**

> Title generated by the [Hozier random fanfic title generator](http://www.generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=22501) because i'm just going to abuse the fact that this exists for the rest of my life.
> 
> Fictober lives! 
> 
> This is very much experimental and I just wasn't sure about this fic but I gotta post something so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

They find her curled up in the cupboard that she’d covered in mirrors a week ago – they’d thought it was cute that her imaginary friend told her it would keep her safe – covered in blood. 

There’s broken furniture all over the house and what look like claw marks in the kitchen. But there’s no blood anywhere else.

Her parents are frantic – frantic enough that they don’t think to look for her older brother who was supposed to be watching her until they realize that none of the blood is hers.

They never find her brother. 

She insists that the _shadows_ took him. 

And at first they hold her close and don’t let her out of their sight, but as she continues to insist that her imaginary friend warned her and that she, in turn, warned her brother and he didn’t _listen_ and that he let the shadows in they start to have more and more trouble with it.

She’s six.

She moves in with her grandma at seven. 

Grandma Page is an unpleasant woman. 

Years later Karen will find out that her Grandma lost seven children before they were one year old, with only two managing to survive to adulthood and some of her behavior will make more sense, but at seven all she knows is that if she talks about her invisible friend then her Grandma sends her to bed without dinner.

She stops talking about her invisible friend – everyone else calls him imaginary but she knows he’s there, she also knows he’s not invisible because she can see him but she’s a precocious child and understands that others can’t. 

She can see the shadows, too, like the ones that took her brother and no one else sees them. She sees them hanging around rooms or people – especially when Grandma takes her to the old folk’s home to visit her friends.

At eight Grandma takes away her mirrors and she starts to steal them. Mirrors keep you safe from the shadows, they don’t like to see themselves. 

By the time she enters middle school she’s been deemed a troublemaker in her small Vermont town. The rumor is that she watched her brother kill himself and went crazy and so her folks gave her up and moved away and have a normal healthy family now. Everyone knows that no one wants Karen Page around. She’s weird. 

People keep going missing – but that’s happening all over the country and people just shake their heads and talk about how it was better, before. 

There are more shadows than ever before by the time Karen graduates High School, and no one else can see them. Her friend – the only one she has and the one no one else can see – hasn’t been around in a few years and she thinks she might accept that he wasn’t real if she couldn’t still see the shadows. 

She’s old enough now that she wants to give them a different name, because they aren’t just shadows. Shadows don’t have sharp teeth that glint in the light or red eyes that glow or claws that scritch-scratch across the floor of her Grandma’s kitchen while she huddles against a corner with her mirrors around her. 

They’re not after her – or they’re not after her especially.But they don’t like that she can see them. 

She gets out as soon as she can – the only school that she can afford, that offered her a scholarship because of her writing and didn’t care about her tiny number of extracurriculars – is only four hours away.She want’s to be further away but, well beggers and choosing. 

There are shadows in this town too. 

She wonders if they’re everywhere. 

They are everywhere. 

After graduation when she moves to New York City she finds more there — thick and tricky and everywhere. 

They gather and slither after people — some seem to constantly be haunted by them and she still doesn’t understand but she tries to avoid them and then avoiding them leads her to finding some paperwork she shouldn’t and — 

It’s not the police officer who tries to kill her that scares her, it’s the shadow behind him that bruises her throat and costs most of her voice and then there’s the shadows behind one of the lawyers — but the other one doesn’t have any shadows and that convinces her. 

The shadows around the other lawyer only seem to increase and increase but — his shadows never threaten her, and she doesn’t understand what that means until she meets the devil of hell’s kitchen and it’s the same. 

And then she meets Frank. 

There are no shadows around Frank. 

And at first it doesn’t make sense to her — if anyone should have shadows stalking his every step it would be him.

But no. Not a single shadow lingers behind his steps.

The shadows are _afraid _of him. She’s never found anything but mirrors that the shadows are afraid of before. 

And it makes her feel safe — or not safe but — it reminds her of crouching in the cupboard, covered in mirrors, knowing nothing could get her even as the shadows raged through her house. It makes her feel like she’s safe when she’s close to him but that everything is going to hell around her and there’s nothing she can do and — it makes her feel weightless.

And then — and then she sees a shadow and she tracks it with her eyes, because she can’t not, not when they might attack and —

  
Frank tracks it too.

And he can see them and…

Not that he’ll admit it, but he’s not subtle when his eyes follow the trail of a shadow as it slinks across the room and she doesn’t need him to admit it when he knows and she knows he knows and he knows she knows.

She’s not sure what it means yet, but it means something, and she’s going to figure out what it is. 

Even if she has to follow the shadows to do so.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me [on tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/capriciouswrites), I love when people talk to me.
> 
> No beta's we die like men -- please let me know what you thought! <strike>oh dear god what am i doing why am i doing fictober why does this continue whhhhhhy</strike>


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